“I always enjoyed working with students in small classes,” said Zakin, who especially liked teaching interdisciplinary courses in medieval studies for the Honors Program.

“In order to teach large classes, you have to be a bit of an actor or actress, a real performer,” Zakin said. She preferred the interaction of working with students one-on-one, where she could see who needed extra help, or draw in those whose attention wandered.

It’s a type of care she experienced from her dissertation adviser at Syracuse University, medieval art historian Meredith Lillich. Although there was no e-mail in the mid-1970s, Lillich would send copious handwritten notes by post while traveling all over the world. Since joining the Oswego faculty in 1970, Zakin had many female role models, ranging from Presidents Virginia L. Radley and Deborah F. Stanley to former Vice President Patti Peterson and Professors Marilynn Smiley and Rosemarie Imhoff. She tried to pass that mentorship on to students and to other faculty members in her work as department chair from 2002 to 2007.

While she doesn’t enjoy the impersonal nature of teaching online, Zakin says the Internet has opened a world of possibilities for the art historian. “At the Pierrepont Morgan Library online, you can get into the manuscripts, page after page,” she says. “You can see the [stained] glass in Shropshire Cathedral, panel by panel.”

But for Zakin, nothing compares to traveling the world, studying art in its own setting. A noted expert on medieval stained glass, she is a member of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, a prestigious international organization that catalogs stained glass. Throughout her 40-year career, she visited hundreds of cathedrals and museums, and attended conferences or presented papers
in most countries in Europe. Her 2001 book catalogued French stained glass in American Midwestern collections. In 1992, she spent six weeks researching the stained glass holdings of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. With her husband of 40 years, ceramicist and Oswego Art Professor Emeritus Richard Zakin, she has traveled to Turkey, Spain, Italy, Poland and France among other European nations, as well as the United States.

While traveling, she took photos to share with her Oswego classes. In Pisa, Italy, she photographed underdrawings for frescoes, revealed by World War II bomb damage.

For all her globe hopping, the St. Louis native has no desire to make her home anywhere but in Oswego, thanks to the area’s rich heritage. “There are layers and layers of history in this town that one could peel away, and that fascinates me,” she said, pointing to the city’s role in major historical movements like abolitionism and the Underground Railroad.

Since her retirement from the college in 2009, Zakin has kept busy exercising her mind and body with Spanish classes, reading, yoga and jogging. She volunteers for political campaigns and the Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music. Her newest passion is gardening. Zakin, who received her bachelor of fine arts degree in studio art, still enjoys painting and photography.

She remains grateful for the opportunities she received at Oswego, her first and only faculty post, which she held for four decades. “There’s a certain intimacy about this place, I know I wouldn’t find anywhere else,” she said.

— Michele Reed

When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Oct. 6 that Dr. Ei-ichi Negishi and two colleagues had won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, excitement surged through the network of Oswego alumni around the country.

Silveira began collaborating with Negishi, now the Herbert C. Brown distinguished professor of organic chemistry at Purdue University, in the early 1970s when the 2010 Nobel laureate was an assistant professor at Syracuse University and Silveira was an associate professor at Oswego.

They both engaged their students in their collaborative projects and co-authored papers with them that became part of the overall package that the Nobel honored, Silveira said.

Their research involved using the metallic element palladium as a catalyst to synthesize complex carbon-based molecules. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences called that “one of the most sophisticated tools available to chemists today and one that is used by researchers worldwide and in commercial production of pharmaceuticals and molecules used to make electronics.”

Plante was the second Oswego student working with Silveira who collaborated with Negishi. He said he was particularly thrilled by the Nobel news because he saw an interview in which Negishi said the award was based on a core of research done from 1976 to 1978. Plante is the co-author — with Negishi, Silveira and K. W. Chiu — of a paper that came out in 1976 in the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry.

Silveira and Negishi’s collaboration extended for more than 20 years, involved Silveira’s students at Oswego and Negishi’s students and post-doctoral fellows at Syracuse and Purdue universities, led to at least 11 jointly authored research publications and contributed to many more.

Silveira himself was the recipient of more than 50 national awards in recognition of his chemistry teaching and research work with his students and his community service during his 38-year career at Oswego.

Silveira and Negishi last co-authored a paper in 1996 and have stayed in touch since Silveira’s retirement in 2000.

In March 2010, Negishi received the American Chemical Society award recognizing creative work in synthetic organic chemistry at the national ACS meeting in San Francisco. Silveira attended the dinner to celebrate the occasion and said he was pleased to see many Oswego students cited and acknowledged for their work.

“I cherish our friendship of many years,” Silveira said of Negishi.